![\"Book](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/6100bb13-6765-4391-9381-d40fd31ca0ca.jpg\")
<\/p>\nIf you want an origin story of modern AI you could do worse than pick a chess tournament 30 years ago in Liechtenstein. Here, a 12-year-old schoolboy from Britain played a German chess master. The game was equally matched. The German had experience. The schoolboy, Demis Hassabis, was one of the top players in his age group in the world. He had youth and a future mapped out. He was to be a professional chess player.<\/p>\n
They probed, they parried. Around them, the room emptied. Still they played. Then, the dance came to an end. The German trapped his king. Hassabis resigned. Experience had won. But Hassabis had made a mistake. There had been a way to force a draw.<\/p>\n
\u201cImmediately, his opponent leapt to his feet,\u201d Sebastian Mallaby writes in The Infinity Machine. \u201c\u2018Why have you resigned?\u2019 Hassabis remembers him asking.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the rest of the day Hassabis felt sick to his stomach. But the next morning he experienced an epiphany.\u201d That epiphany? He looked at all these people at the tournament, all these brains focused on black and white pieces of plastic, that could be thinking about ways to help the world. \u201cI thought we were wasting our minds.\u201d So he stopped.<\/p>\n
From that day Hassabis and his mind \u2014 the Nobel prizewinning mind that now runs AI for Google \u2014 went on to do, well, lots of things. He was accepted by the University of Cambridge at 16, but told to wait two years. So on his gap year he helped to program Theme Park, one of the bestselling console and PC games of the 1990s. When he reached 18 the boss of the games company offered him \u00a3500,000 to stay. He declined. He had plans.<\/p>\n
At Cambridge he learnt the board game Go. He was so good at it that the professor who taught him published his moves in a guide to the game. He also learnt table football. He became, he reckoned, the best player at the university.<\/p>\n
Books newsletter<\/p>\n
News, reviews, author interviews and suggested reads from our literary editors.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tSign up with one click<\/p>\n
There are a lot of anecdotes like that in Mallaby\u2019s book. Early in his life Hassabis\u2019s father passed on the sort of bromide lots of parents tell their children. He said that it didn\u2019t matter if you won or lost, so long as you did your best. Hassabis took it to heart.<\/p>\n
Mallaby interviews Hassabis\u2019s friend and colleague Shane Legg. \u201cI don\u2019t think his father meant his comment in quite that literal sense,\u201d Legg reflected. \u201cLike, \u2018Try your best\u2019 wasn\u2019t supposed to mean, \u2018Try literally to the point of destroying yourself, go absolutely, completely 100 per cent.\u2019 But that\u2019s how Demis understood it.\u201d<\/p>\n
In The Infinity Game, Mallaby is not just telling the story of Hassabis. He is also telling the story of AI. Hassabis is a good choice of character on which to hang that tale. It\u2019s not only that he is the most interesting of all the AI bosses. It\u2019s also that \u2014 and this feels increasingly pertinent given how much of our future depends on those bosses \u2014 he\u2019s not creepy, psychotic or weird.<\/p>\n
I first interviewed him when his company DeepMind had just done two things: designed an AI that could win at Atari games and been bought for a nine-figure sum by Google. I was impressed by the achievement and confused as to why Google thought it worth hundreds of millions.<\/p>\n
I interviewed him three years later after DeepMind had triumphed at a rather trickier game \u2014 Go. He had gone from having his Go games appearing in a handbook to building the finest Go-playing entity the world had seen \u2014 so good that, after playing it, the previous best Go-playing entity the world had seen, a human called Lee Sedol, apologised to humanity and quit. Again, it was impressive. Again, I couldn\u2019t understand the attraction for Google.<\/p>\n
When, I asked, would he do something useful? His response? They were working on solving something called protein folding. Predicting the shapes proteins made was a 50-year grand challenge of biology. Doing so successfully would revolutionise the world. I remember thinking when he said it that, even couched in English diffidence, it was a bit hubristic.<\/p>\n
Then ten years later we chatted again<\/a> after he got his Nobel prize for solving protein folding. He celebrated the Nobel, by the way, with a poker evening with the lads. \u201cThe lads\u201d being some world poker champions and Magnus Carlsen, the greatest chess player in history. Carlsen later told me that Hassabis was \u201ca very stubborn player\u201d. Maybe he is a bit weird after all.<\/p>\n Over the course of hours of interviews in the back room of a north London pub, Mallaby has tried to understand that weirdness and stubbornness. The story that has emerged is one of a soaring vision, and the will to make it happen. But also, it seems to me, the story of a fall \u2014 in the Biblical sense.<\/p>\n When Hassabis was working on Theme Park, he read the Culture series of novels by Iain M Banks. They describe a world without want or scarcity in which humanity used its abundance of resources to become an interstellar civilisation. How did it achieve that? By solving intelligence, by making AI.<\/p>\n This is, still, Hassabis\u2019s vision. To achieve it, though, to get DeepMind to where it is, he has had to look down from the stars, to things a little more gutter-like.<\/p>\n